A South Korean missionary arrested months ago in North Korea
has confessed
he was setting up a spy ring. Under the circumstances, I am
skeptical of this confession. Truth is of little importance to the
North Korean state.

Plastics made in this way should not have to compete on an equal basis
with plastics made from petroleum. Rather, they should be subsidized
through a greenhouse gas emissions tax, which in their case would be
negative (a subsidy).

This seems like a positive step, but the fact that it needs the
support of beverage companies illustrates the lack of democracy in the
US. In a democracy, the people would be strong enough to adopt
policies that some businesses don't like.

Please don't buy any Coca Cola Company products; please support the
world-wide
boycott of Coca Cola Company,
launched because of the murder of union organizers in Colombia.

Schemes like this, that pressure people to let themselves be tracked,
worry me greatly for the future. However, this one will only pressure
those that are already surrendering to pressure, by paying with credit
cards. Don't be tracked — pay cash!

Does that look like a crime to you? I don't know whether I agree with
the statement or not, simply because I don't know the pertinent facts
about that man's office; but even if the statement is a stretch, it
must not be a crime.

US hospitals cut back on nurses 20 years ago. A friend who was a
nurse quit the profession rather than take legal responsibility for
supervising lots of untrained personnel, more than she could
effectively supervise, and be at risk of a lawsuit if any of them
screwed up.

It seems to me that if the inhabitants of the Crimea want to become
part of Russia, they should be allowed to do so; therefore, I suggest
committing to hold a plebiscite in two years time to decide this.

That will give the Crimeans a chance to see whether the government of
Ukraine is democratic and to think about whether they really prefer to
be ruled by Putin.

When we're talking about proprietary software such as Mr Bill profits
from, don't get distracted by the price paid for it; that's a
secondary problem: proprietary software is
an injustice
even if it costs nothing.

I have no more sympathy for these right-wing militants than for
Islamists, but in both cases we must beware of letting the state
manufacture plots to prosecute people who would otherwise never have
done any harm.

For a thug to visit a person with a sign is not violence and doesn't
deny that person's human rights. Thugs often bully and threaten
people, but if all the thug does is show up at someone's door with a
sign, that is not bullying.

Thus far, I don't see any reason why this needs to be restricted or
why it matters what the algorithm is that selects people for visits.

The real question here is, does that visit tend to make a person less
likely to commit crimes? And if so, what other effects does it tend
to have?

If the visits — or other consequences of selection — tend
to have harmful effects on the person selected, that would be a real
problem, and whether race indirectly causes people to be selected
would become a real issue.

I know something about moral courage. Thousands of programmers could,
in 1983, have decided to reject the enticing profits of proprietary
software and develop a free operating system, but I'm the only one who
did it.

I had the determination to swim against the current, and keep doing so
despite ridicule, insults, and attempts to convince me to
ruin
everything by compromising too far. But I didn't have to face a
threat to put me in prison.

Snowden's act demanded far more moral courage than mine, and I honor
him for that.

The perpetrators of mass murder in Indonesia in 1965/6 remain in power
and honored. A documentary that offered them a chance to re-enact the
crimes they are proud of has started a
debate
about the crime.

I won't vote for a right-winger like Hillary Clinton. I did not vote
for her husband in 1996 after I had seen what a right-winger he was,
and I did not vote for Obama for the same reason. It was clear even
in 2008 that he was talking about "Change" to avoid taking a stand for
any important change.

I think it will be an advance if a woman can get elected president,
just as it was an advance that a black man can get elected president,
but I won't support a candidate because of that person's sex or race.
Nor will I support the Democrats merely because Republicans might be
worse. Voting
for the "lesser of two evils" is a road to ever worse. If Ms
Clinton is the Democratic candidate, I will vote Green (again).

Volcanic eruptions since 2000 have caused a
temporary
cooling that cancels out part of the heating effect of greenhouse
gases.

To cancel it out entirely would require a higher level of vulcanism.
However, that would work only for a time. As we pump more greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere, cancelling them out would require a
steadily increasing level of vulcanism.

Setting aside the harm those eruptions would do if they occurred,
there is no reason to expect them to happen.

Uganda's president Museveni is
backtracking
on signing the anti-homosexuality legislation.

The most clearly unjust provision I've seen listed in this law is its
prohibition on expressing the position that homosexuality is
acceptable. I'm not saying this provision is more unjust than the
others (I am not trying to compare them on that dimension), but rather
that the injustice of this provision is the most indisputable, because
it violates freedom of speech.

This article points out a side of the situation which our media tend
to ignore; but it seems to ignore the other side which our media focus
on. President Yanukovych's thugs were the ones that started shooting
the protesters, and as long as they continued, there was no reason to
criticize the protesters for shooting back.

If the people attacked were indeed bombers associated with al-Qa'ida,
that's a good reason to arrest and prosecute them; but does Egypt need
to attack criminals in Egypt with the army? This attack is the sort
of thing one would expect in a civil war.

It's probably the "He hit my stick with his head" accusation that
thugs around the world like to make after they attack someone. Even
in the US, courts tend to believe the thugs if there's no hard
evidence to the contrary.

Container shipping has no need for a canal. The containers can be
offloaded at one coast, then shipped by rail to the other coast. This
would require a little more work, but (with a fast train line) could
even reduce shipping time.

People are exposed to low levels of
toxic
and hormone-disrupting substances throughout their lives, as they
leach into food from plastic packaging. There is very little research
into the effects of this.

It is a difficult question to study; there is no way to do a
controlled experiment, and it is hard to find comparable populations
that differ mainly in how much they keep food and beverages in plastic
packaging.

High prices of electricity might have a positive effect: incentivizing
conservation efforts. But it would have been better to do that with a
tax increase, rather than giving away the increase to private parties.

I do not find it implausible that the US has helped organize the
protests. I do not find it implausible that a provocateur (either
working for the Venezuelan government or working for the US) has
killed people on both sides.

In any case, it is clearly wrong to prosecute the leader of a protest
because violence breaks out later. This resembles what the US did to
the Haymarket
martyrs.

The minimum wage needs to be combined with a welfare system for
those who are unemployed. That way, all low-paid workers benefit,
whether they are still working or not.

To work out an example, suppose half a million jobs are eliminated,
and 50 million minimum-wage workers get a raise. If those workers pay
3% of their increase in income as tax, that would cover the
costs of supporting the other half-million, and all will be better off
than they are now.

This sort of system to transfer income from the rich (who have grabbed
an ever-increasing share) to the rest is exactly what we need.

I would not criticize Ecuador for starting the planning to exploit the
area before formally announcing failure of its plan to permanently
protect the area. That plan depended on donations from wealthier
countries, and it was already clear that the funds requested were not
forthcoming. Its failure was not Ecuador's fault.

We will have to keep after Kellogg to truly implement this agreement,
since it will have an incentive to wink at abuses. However, what
worries me even more is that the unethical suppliers will simply sell
to other companies. To stop the deforestation caused by palm oil
requires systematic enforcement not dependent on one purchaser.

I don't know what his political platform is. I suspect it is to
benefit foreign businesses and their local allies, which I do not
support at all. Nonetheless, he is also standing for political
freedom, in a short-term sense. Maduro had better get behind this
too.

Speaking as one who loves math as it ought to be loved — for its
beauty — I agree with the article. My knowledge of mathematical
logic informs me that it is a fallacy to think that "There are
mathematical jobs available now for workers who are good at math"
implies "If everyone were good at math, there would be mathematical
jobs for everyone."

The US, especially, has no need to increase workers' productivity.
Its production is high enough. The US needs to change the economic
system so that everyone can have a decent life, not just the small
fraction whose labor is still in high demand.

Legalizing same-sex marriage is the right thing to do. But if we need
to depend on business support to win for a worthy cause, we can't
defeat the plutocrats' class war that is driving most Americans, gay
or straight, into poverty.

If the trade dispute was the one about clove-flavored cigarettes,
Indonesia deserves no sympathy for insisting the US allow those deadly
addictive products. Trade treaties are being used world-wide to block
measures to discourage smoking, which is an additional reason those
treaties must be abolished. But these treaties and the surveillance
are different issues.

In this context, I have to mention that I don't think it serves
society's interests to go to such lengths to save a very premature
baby which hasn't even started to become a human being. But that does
not justify Mr Armstrong's position. There are lots of reasons why
employees (or their family members who are already human beings) might
need expensive medical care. Also, the point about commercial
pressures that lead women to delay having children and thus face
greater risks when they do is valid.

A private operator has a financial incentive not to do the whole job.
If it sells to the public in a competitive market, people will judge
it on that. Otherwise, it will screw people without restraint.

A British Muslim extremist, perhaps a convert (judging from his name),
has
been banned
from preaching on pain of arrest.

Incitement to murder is legitimately punished. This man's "vigilante
patrols" may have included attacking passers-by. (Some such Islamist
vigilantism in Britain has done that.) If he advocates Shari'a law,
then he has no respect for others' human rights. He is evidently an
example of the tendency for religions to inspire hatred, which is
common today in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.

But that doesn't justify banning him from stating his views, which is
not a crime. That tramples his human rights.

The UK fails to distinguish between "discrimination and persecution"
and stating a political position.

This sort of law is vitally needed to curb massive surveillance.
People must be free to take photos and videos, but companies should
not be allowed to systematically watch everyone.

The perverse Corporations United decision (to call it what it really
is) in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are entitled to
human rights may lead to a bad decision on this law. Please support
the campaign for a constitutional amendment
to cancel
that decision.

I recommend people join in my almost-boycott of Hollywood: never pay
to see a movie unless you have some reason to believe it is actually
good. While in theory this is not a complete boycott, in practice the
difference is small.

By 2080 I expect the world economy will be too shattered to continue
holding events like the Olympic games. Thus, I have to admit that
global heating will have occasional minor benefits. However, they
will be minuscule compared to the disaster.

Another danger from massive surveillance: once investigators believe
someone is guilty of a crime — any crime —
confirmation
bias will encourage them to focus on whichever parts of the
surveillance information confirm that suspicion, and ignore the parts
that say otherwise.

The million dollar non-fine seems inadequate as a punishment. The
company ought to be prosecuted and put in its own prison.

It has been pointed out that one aspect of white privilege is that
whites are less likely to be prosecuted for certain crimes than blacks
are. By the same criterion, the most privileged class in the US is
that of corporations.

There is a significant difference between the two. Ivory has no
physiological effect; if people like owning ivory, that is just an
acquired taste, which they could easily learn to change. Nonetheless,
the article could be right.

Geologists are seriously considering the idea that humans, through
global heating and ecological disruption, have caused a
new
geological period, which they propose to call the Anthropocene.

I am concerned that the name "Anthropocene" may provoke irrational
pride: some humans may think, "An epoch named after US humans proves
our importance — we've really made it now." Even people who
would not say this may feel it and be subtly influenced by it. That
would be most unfortunate, since considering the epoch as an award
would lead people not to recognize this development as the catastrophe
that it is.

I therefore suggest choosing another name. The name that best
characterizes what's coming in this epoch is "Obscene".

Seriously, since the change consists primarily of global heating, how
about "Thermocene"? The heating is caused mainly by combustion (of
fossil fuel and forests), so how about "Pyrocene"?

In the 1990s, I was told, activists of this movement were arrested
on the pretext that they were using unauthorized copies of Windows.
They could not afford authorized copies, of course. Then I heard
that they had switched to GNU/Linux to protect themselves.

If US Republicans are serious in their concern for future generations,
they should protect them from
global
heating disaster.

This reasoning won't influence congressional Republicans, because they
don't care about future generations except for the wealthy. Their
pretended concern is nothing but an excuse to kick the poor today.

I don't know the facts, but my guess is that some of the ex-Yugoslav
industries should have been privatized, because they made products for
a competitive market. That doesn't justify cheating the workers.
Perhaps they should have been turned into worker cooperatives.

Given their perverse austerity policies, they will take those funds
out of aid for the poor. But why didn't they offer unlimited funds to
prevent floods — including curbing CO2 emissions that are likely
to make for worse floods in the future?

Thugs often attack innocent people, and make a special point of
attacking people who are particularly virtuous (such as protesters for
good causes). They are hardly ever prosecuted for this. If once in a
while they get hit back, that's only a small step towards justice.

I understand the pressure to limit immigration. As millions start to
flee from land that has turned into desert or ocean, this pressure
will become enormous. No country is obliged to accept millions of
refugees.

However, it makes a difference that our carbon emissions are
responsible for the spreading deserts and oceans — and
stop
them. If we don't want to accept those millions of refugees we
should stop destroying their land.

It is not strong enough on certain issues. For instance, it fails to
oppose the censorship which many EU countries have already imposed,
and fails to call for an end to existing mass surveillance measures
such as the mandatory data retention for ISPs and phone companies.

It would be great if Verizon killed off Netflix, whose business is
fundamentally unethical because of DRM. But there is little chance of
that; eventually they will make a deal, with Netflix paying Verizon
some money.

To ransom hostages is cowardly; the right thing to do is to hold a
funeral for them, in effect spitting in the kidnapers' faces. This
takes courage, but discourage kidnapers, whereas a cowardly response
keeps it going.

It is not clear how the Eritreans first fall into the hands of
traffickers.

The first rule of ensuring that a foreign army can get along with
local civilians is to punish any crimes by soldiers against civilians
very sternly. The US may think it doesn't need to do this. The US is
mistaken.

If Lynch's grounds for refusal were as stated, that the scholar was
associated with a university with a campus in a colony in Palestinian
territory, that was political, not racial. So I think the lawsuit is
mistaken.

However, I criticize Lynch's decision to apply the boycott to an
individual person. The American Studies Association, in adopting a
boycott of Israeli academic institutions, emphasized that this was
not
aimed at Israeli scholars.

Aside from the point that the speed-up is cyclical, there's also the
point that the reason it causes heat to go into the ocean is that the
air is hotter than the ocean. Once the ocean gets sufficiently
hotter, heat will start to remain in the air.

This is a step forward, but it is a shame to limit this escape route
to those who are going to die soon anyway, and exclude people who
can't commit suicide on their own because they are totally physically
incapacitated. Some of those people face possibly decades of futile
boredom, in some cases combined with horrible pain.

Since the Australian government is covering up the whole activity, its
denials are worthless. If it wants to convince us, it should make
recordings as proof. As long as it covers up its actions we should
believe all the accusations.

The practice in which relatives despise girls that have been raped is
found in many parts of the world. In Samoa, men used (and perhaps
still use) surreptitious rape to as a means to force girls to come and
live with them; they knew their families would reject them for being
raped. This happens because the girl's parents think of her as an
asset rather than as a person.

While this is the right thing to do, I wonder when the UK, US, and
other countries will start sentencing thugs to prison for making more
serious false accusations against people who are not important
politicians.

Several European countries also block web sites by decree, and the US
government "seizes" domain names by decree. India has the power to
take down a web site by decree. These practices are unjust in any
country.

The tracking of web visits also exists in Europe and to some extent in
the US.

I reject the term "DDOS attack". When activists do it, it is a form
of online protest; I won't call it an "attack" when someone else does
it. What happened here is that the state sent a crowd of state agents
to protest at a people's houses and the pubs where they meet.

I don't advocate banning tobacco, because prohibiting addictive drugs
does great social harm. However, it should not be sold in pharmacies
because selling it there gives tobacco a sort of medical endorsement.

This does not in any way excuse Assad for his tyranny and crimes. It
also does not excuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia for funding and
encouraging an armed rebellion in Syria when peaceful protests were
going strong.

I only partly agree with the idea of animal rights, but I do support
human rights, and labeling animal rights activism as "terrorism"
clearly violates them. I don't have to agree with them to support
their right to campaign for their views.

I wish these talks had made progress. Given that the Afghan
government lacks the support necessary to defeat the Taliban, and that
it increasingly
spits
on women's rights, I don't think trying to "win the war" makes any
sense.

Clever
tricks that web sites use to collect information about visitors
and correlate those with names.

How these companies currently use the data they collect is not
significant because (1) they could change those policies tomorrow and
(2) those policies don't apply when government agencies such as the
NSA collect the data.

The Theater of Security Agency and all its staff
knew
in advance that X-ray scanners were useless and dangerous. The
TSA delayed and endangered passengers with those machines solely to
give the impression it was Doing Something.

The article also says that power-tripping TSA agents impose extra
searches and delays as a form of harassment, while dishonestly
claiming it is a "random search".

Citizens of California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia,
Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and
Wisconsin: call on your senators
to oppose
the cuts in food stamps, which will fall mainly on those states.

I do feel irritated when I get checked by "security", usually at
airports. I hope you do, too. If this robot keeps permanent records,
which I expect it will, it will be like a mobile surveillance camera
installation.

Simply dictating "no more manual scavenging of human wastes" won't
change anything in places where the systems require manual scavenging.
What's needed is a program to build sewer systems and toilets
connected to them. That will take money and time.

Bumblebees are important pollinators; endangering them is playing with
fire. The doubts that are raised in the article might affect the
level of damage that normally occurs, but not the fact that it
happens.

Egypt plans to charge 20 al-Jazeera journalists with
ludicrous
charges ranging from belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood to
"harming the national interest" and illicit possession of broadcast
equipment.

This was when the attempt to reach a global agreement to reduce CO2
emissions and avert disaster failed spectacularly because many
governments were unwilling to agree on a real solution. The US was
unwilling, and this NSA surveillance surely helped the US government
achieve its aim of "no deal, burn away!"

Clapper
has lied
to Congress before with impunity; I would not put it past him to
lie about this too. Whether this is true or not, his am is surely to
convince us that massive general surveillance is necessary.

If he is not lying, perhaps he is exaggerating. Perhaps some member
of al-Nusra said to others, "Wouldn't it be great to attack Americas
some day?" and others said, "Sure, after we kill all the Syrian
Shi'ites and Christians, let's kill Americans next."

Syria is a fight involving at least three sides that are murderous and
evil. If any one of them were the only one, we could envision
intervening against that side if the Syrian people wanted us
to. Those who want an intervention against one side can easily
cite valid reasons for it.

But it is not feasible to intervene against all the evil
sides; and if we were to intervene against only some of them, in
effect we would be supporting the others.

I don't see any military way to make things better in Syria; at least
let's avoid making them worse.

If these charges are false, why didn't the Coast Guard make a video to
document the truth?

The migrants share the responsibility for the death of the children,
having brought them on such a dangerous trip, but that doesn't excuse
the Coast Guard for killing them.

This doesn't mean that migrants are entitled to go to Greece just
because they would like to. I understand that they had to flee
Afghanistan and Syria, but they could stay in Turkey (which is where
they were coming from).

To some extent this is because Google designed it to track you. This
includes the fact that it asks you which address you're interested in.
I used to use Google Maps, back when it worked without running nonfree
Javascript code, but I never entered an address; instead I scrolled
around in the area I was interested in and found the address for
myself.

NYC thugs
beat
up an old man who was crossing the street against the light, then
charged him with "resisting arrest" (he ignored their orders because
he doesn't understand English). Naturally, the New York thug
commissioner stood up for the thugs.

The author may be right that most thugs would not engage in such
violence. But nearly all thugs will defend their fellow thugs who do
carry out such attacks, and that's why they deserve the name of
"thugs".

The proposed applications vary in terms of the danger of bad side
effects. Dosing bees with RNA to kill varroa mites is unlikely to
result in exposing other wild insects to that RNA; if it doesn't hurt
the bees, it won't do harm. By contrast, corn that generates
interfering RNA can't avoid exposing all the species that live near
the field, and there are lots of those.

I think that the interfering RNAs should be delivered in sprays, not
made by crops, for two reasons:

The sprays would not deny farmers the right to save and trade seeds.

The sprays could be applied at particular times, which might reduce
the danger to other insects that are not the targets.

It looks like the US is heading for a situation where millions of
people who are fit to work can't find any jobs. The plutocrats would
like to take advantage of this to force wages down for just about
everyone. Instead we must redesign society so that everyone can have
a decent life, even those who get no work. This could involve welfare
for everyone. This could involve rejecting, even banning certain
forms of automation. One way or another, it must be done.

I wish I could be so confident. I fear that states, which already
seek to surveil all private correspondence and already act as agents
for the copyright industry, will extend their surveillance to the
point of achieving what Falkvinge considers impossible.

There is another way that the copyright industry can succeed in
subjugating everyone: through streaming. If people are so foolish as
to tolerate streaming instead of having a copy, no one will be able to
share.

It is clear that we must reject any streaming service that doesn't
allow users to download copies. And if it does allow users to
download copies, we must make a point of using it that way.

I have no sympathy for Sahal Iskudhuq, or for the Shabaab, which is an
Islamist extremist group. However, the death of a leader in such a
group is generally not much of a setback. Lots of others are ready to
take his place. What affects the success of the group is its power to
recruit. Did this attack reduce that, or increase that?

Given that there is a civil war in Somalia, in principle the US can
legitimately give the government military support. Did that
government ask for this attack? Maybe in general terms.

It's clear that these GMOs can't be broadly toxic to humans, for the
consequences would have been impossible to miss. However, problems
affecting particular classes of people (perhaps depending on the
details of their immune systems) are not impossible.

What worries me most is the spread of pollen. Plants do hybridize in
nature.

The US government also acts as the marketing arm for companies such as
Microsoft. In 2011 the Indian state of Tamil Nadu switched from
distributing computers with GNU/Linux to distributing them with
Windows, and this is suspected to be the result of a visit by Hillary
Clinton.

Even if there were enough job offers to give every American that would
like to work a low-paid job, that wouldn't make the country
prosperous. Additional demand for workers is needed in order for
wages to rise. So we need to create more jobs — until we
reorganize society so you can have a decent life without working if
nobody wants your labor.

However, another possibility occurs to me. Given how much these
bombings benefit the military rulers, I wonder whether some of them
are false flag attacks — carried out by the military and
attributed to Islamists.

Neither explanation seems impossible. I can envision Islamist
extremists who continue using violence even when it is self defeating,
and I would not put anything past al-Sisi's men.

Will these crops be safe for humans to eat, and for wildlife? I don't
see any obvious reason why they would not be, but you can't predict
what will happen in complex systems such as the human body or natural
ecosystems. Only trial will tell.

It could be that it is safe for most people but a few are allergic to
it. It is important to maintain alternatives, so that anyone who is
allergic can avoid this.

These crops would be patented, which means they would deny farmers
their traditional right to save seeds. Note how the person
interviewed cites
the bogus term
"intellectual property" to justify the radical claim that the
results of publicly funded research should be used to extract money
from the public.

There was a second possibly toxic chemical in the West Virginia toxic
spill, which the company
didn't
bother to report.

Since the company is already bankrupt, its owners probably see no
reason to care what happens.

Once the spill happens, our system for preventing spills has already
proved inadequate. We must inspect chemical plants frequently, and
tax them enough to pay for it. They must be required to report about
the storage of toxic materials, too; we cannot cater to their desire
for secrecy.

It also bans collecting information about thugs, which I presume
includes photos or videos of what they do. In the US, that's not
illegal, but the thugs wish it were, so they fabricate accusations
against those who take photos.

The article presents the information annoyingly via images, which help
the companies by presenting their logos. I see no reason to do that.
Here's what the text in those images says.

Gates Foundation says: "Our nutrition efforts focus on delivering
proven interventions and developing better tools and strategies for
providing pregnant women and young children with the foods and
nutrients they need"

Gates Foundation says: Bill and Melinda Gates "Have defined areas in
which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit
model is centrally tied to corporate activity that they find
egregious".

The Foundation's trust invested in:

Geo (The Geo Group) (Private prison company)

G4S (UK Based private security company & operator of 19 juvenile
detention facilities in the US)

DynCorp International (Military contractor)

Gates Foundation says: "The foundation believes that climate change is
a major issue facing all of us, particularly poor people in developing
countries …"

The percentage of US adults in or looking for employment fell to
under
63%. Large numbers have recently given up looking for work.

Perhaps they gave up hope of finding a job long ago, and were counted
as seeking employment only because of their unemployment benefits.
Once those were cut off, they had no reason to keep looking for
work that they know they can't find.

The big question, for civilization, is whether the
US,
Canada
and
Australia,
effectively subservient to fossil fuel companies, will frustrate hopes
for a climate protection agreement in 2015. They have won every time
so far.

Success requires cooperation from China, India, Brazil, Indonesia
and other major countries.

9 of the 10 hottest years on record were since 2001, the exception
being 1998 which had a very strong El Niño. In 2013, the short-term
variable factors operated for cold; despite
them, it
was tied for fourth hottest on record.

Lack of money to meet ordinary needs could be responsible for both.
The sense of desperation causes stress that leads to anger; some men
would express that anger with violence. Poverty may also impede
access to contraception.

A decent society offers everyone a decent life. This can involve
having to work, but should not impose the stress of being poor.

Large numbers of protesters, enraged by new limits on protests,
battled
thugs in Ukraine.

The anti-protest restrictions are interesting. The ban on amplifiers
follows New York City, which restricted Occupy Wall Street the same
way. The ban on masks is found in France and in many other places.
These restrictions on protesters are antidemocratic no matter where
they are found.

The reason for that transfer is that the Pentagon has to obey laws of
war which the CIA
secretly
ignores. It is bizarre for Congress to concern itself with such a
thing. I wonder if some members of Congress were blackmailed.

Of course, the last few will be better protected, so it might take a
few more years for poachers to get them all. However, when a species
is reduced to a few individuals, its genetic diversity is reduced and
it is more vulnerable for hundreds of thousands of years thereafter.

Genetic engineering is a method of modifying organisms, not a kind of
organism. The results are disparate. Whether any given genetic
modification is safe (for humans that eat it, for the environment, for
the rights of farmers) depends on the details. It has to be tested
and evaluated separately for each GM variety, since we have too little
experience to generalize about the effects. Likewise, whether it
really improves anything is also a matter of details. The GMOs now in
use mostly go with use of pesticides.

When large numbers of people are exposed to small levels of
radioactivity, a small danger for each person can add up to a
substantial number of additional deaths. It might mean, for instance,
101,000 cases of a certain kind of cancer in a population of 10
million, instead of 100,000. 1000 deaths is worth avoiding if
possible, but there is no reason for any one person to go to great
lengths to avoid this small danger.

Kurdish protesters leaving the UK for Paris were
robbed
of their cash by the border guards who accused them of planning to
give it to the PKK.

The is a rebel group; I don't know whether it is terrorist. Banning
contributions to the PKK is legitimate, but taking away small amounts
of cash like this on unproved suspicion is gratuitously nasty. The
PKK would be on its knees if it depended on that funding mechanism.

Coal spews lots of toxic pollution, including radioactive fallout.
The EPA needs to make rules to reduce use of coal.

Canada says it will
increase
CO2 emissions almost 40% by 2030, which is probably an
underestimate of the emissions that extraction of oil from tar sands
will cause. Furthermore, it doesn't count the emissions from burning
that oil in other countries.

Google's
purchase
of Nest indicates that Google wants to control the "internet of
things" — and entice people into handing over lots more
information about their lives to Google.

If you want something to figure out that it should turn up your home
thermostat because you're heading for home and the day is cold, there
is no a priori reason why that should involve any company's server.
That computation is yours, personally, and need not involved anyone
else.

I wish we could do something to protect Afghan women, but supporting
Karzai's government isn't doing it. There isn't enough will in Afghan
society to do this.

The only idea that occurs to me is to arm Afghan women and help them
form refugee camps where they can defend themselves. That plan might
be inadequate for various reasons, but it illustrates the though of
new thinking that we have to try.

They were in charge of local trading activities, and must have been 2
or more levels down from the top management. Was it possible that
Libor rigging could be so widespread without encouragement from above?

Afghanistan follows most Muslim countries in having legal retribution
against Muslims that convert to any other position. The world needs
to be more aware that Islam in political power means persecution.

While it was an accident that this particular plant leaked toxins into
the river just now, it is no accident that the US has lots of chemical
plants that have a certain chance of poisoning people
or exploding
at any time. That is the result of policy choices.

Charter schools are a form of privatization. In general,
privatization is presented as a way to make some service more
efficient, but its real effect is to enrich a few. That's true in
this case, but it also represents a way for the state to abandon poor
people, now increasingly considered superfluous by the plutocratic
state.

For the sake of sales clerk's employment, I refuse to use the
self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drug stores. When I go
into a drug store that has these machines, I shout to the people who
use them, "Using those machines puts Americans out of work".

I think we should prohibit those machines simply to keep employment
up.

The risk that the store's copy of your personal data might be obtained
by crackers should not distract you from the bigger risk — the
use that will be made of your personal data with permission
of companies that possess it.

I won't give any personal data to a store, because I don't want my
purchases to be associated with me. I won't give the store even my
name.

The worst piece of data to give to a store is your credit card number.
Even if it is never obtained by crackers, it will identify you to the
store's data base together with what you bought.

Do as I do: pay cash, and never give stores your personal data. If
you never give it, you won't learn it as a habit, so you won't start
handing it over as a habit.

This demonstrates once again pro-surveillance officials' predilection
for stretching the truth. Aside from that, the issue is a secondary
one. Even if terrorists change their tactics, and even if that helps
them a little, they are a secondary threat. A government that
surveils
everyone and thus eliminates democracy is more dangerous than any
independent terrorists.

This particular company doesn't know anyone's name, but there are
other companies that can relate the phone's MAC address to a name.
Put those two data bases together and presto, it says who has gone
where.

If the phone talks to the phone network, then the phone company
already records where it goes. The two methods of tracking lead to
the same intolerable result.

To fight surveillance effectively, our target must go beyond the NSA.
Other branches of government do surveillance too; we must limit
license plate recognizers and face recognizers even if they are run by
local governments.

If you understand that global heating is probably leading to disaster,
and we don't know exactly how far away the disaster is, you don't need
to a measure of the cost of short-term effects. However, that measure
may help to convince short-term-minded people.

Hrant
Dink, martyr for freedom of speech, was tried in Turkey for the
"crime" of affirming the genocide of the Armenians. Then, when France
first considered a law to make it a "crime" to deny the genocide of
the Armenians, Dink said he would go to France and deny it as a
protest.

Former Merck employees claim in a lawsuit that Merck falsified data
about the effectiveness of its vaccine against mumps, and
used
incorrect test procedures designed to make the vaccine look more
effective than it really was.

I found out about this through a site called nvic.org, but that site
exaggerated and distorted this issue by presenting the vaccine as
unsafe. Another page claimed that a tiny amount of formaldehyde in a
vaccine was dangerous on principle, though it is much less
formaldehyde than is normally found in the human body. While that
site is not 100% false, it is not reliable either.

Unfounded rumors claiming vaccines are dangerous has led people to
refuse vaccination for their children, which ironically has resulted
in disease outbreaks that really damage children. The most glaring
instance is the
opposition
to polio vaccination in Pakistan and Syria, which results in
permanent palsy for some children.

Once a tax cut gets applied to a part of the US, businesses will push
to spread it to more parts. Then businesses elsewhere say that
"fairness" means they should get a tax cut too. Eventually it spreads
into a general tax cut for business.

Business pays too little taxes in general. If we want to put specific
zones at an advantage, let's raise taxes for business everywhere
except those zones.

The idea that Congress is "not functioning" represents a fundamental
misunderstanding, comparable to saying that a football game is "not
functioning" because the score is 0-0. What it means is that neither
side can overcome the other side to score.

However, that analogy goes only so far. In Congress, it's not a mere
game. The two sides are "totally for the rich" and "mostly for the
rich but with some concern for the rest", and the points that are
occasionally scored against the poor do tremendous harm.

Exposure Chris Christie's underlings' disguised
retribution
scheme has called attention to bad decisions that are clearly the
responsibility of Christie himself.

I won't claim that Christie must have known about this particular
scheme. I would not expect a governor to personally pay attention
each specific action taken, whether ethical or not. However, he may
have told, or led, his underlings over the years to plan various kinds
of political pressure and retaliation and not bother him with the
details. That would still make him responsible overall.

Meanwhile, in a complex of ironies, the extremist Lieberman wants to
transfer some Arab villages from Israel to Palestine, as a drop of
ethnic cleansing, but the inhabitants would rather be Israeli Arabs.

The crucial question, not apparently addressed here, is: would it be
possible to burn oil faster than it's going to be available, while
avoiding the worse disaster that global heating is taking us towards?

A limit at a place that, for other reasons, we must not even approach
is no real limit.

When Wisconsin's anti-worker Governor Walker was facing recall, the
Koch brothers bought
TV
ads invoking a peculiar principle that it's unfair to recall an
official merely to stop him from pushing horrible laws.

These jobs are done inefficiently by humans, often at very low pay and
in bad conditions. If new the robots are able to do the jobs, it will
be good that people don't have to live like that. On the other hand,
it will not be good if they starve instead.

At a meeting in Cambridge, some 15 years ago, a man said, "If robots
make it, we've gotta take it." We must not let the owners of the
robots own what the robots produce, leaving most people with only
trickle-down.

US electric utilities are slamming the brakes on installation of solar
panels, and
homeowners
are fighting back. I've heard that the same is happening in
Spain.

Many homeowners would be delighted to disconnect from the electrical
grid, and depend on their own solar power and their own batteries. If
they use heavy equipment such as washing machines only when the sun
shines, and leave refrigerators closed at night, it might work.
However, some cities in California prohibit this: I'm told that in San
Jose, a house with no electric utility account will be condemned just
for that.

It's possible that the thugs really believed Duggan had a gun. It's
possible he did have one, in the box. It's possible the thug who shot
Duggan really believed at the time that the gun was in his hand.
These are not implausible.

But it seems clear that someone other than Duggan put the sock-covered
gun on the other side of the fence, and the obvious suspects are thugs
trying to make the shooting look justified.

Honduran peasants' land was stolen to grow palm oil, which provides
"carbon offsets" for international businesses, so they can
avoid
cutting emissions. Crushing the resistance peasants' resistance
seems to have part of the motive for the coup.

Emissions trading is a mistake in general; it has been gamed so much
that it achieves nothing, while promoting evil like this in Honduras.
A tax on fuels can't be gamed.

There are reasons to avoid accustoming wild animals to people, but
when that has already occurred, there's no use denying it. At some
point, we might as well accept that this dolphin needs human company.

There have been thousands of complaints
that fracking
wells harmed water supplies in he US. Only a few of the complaints
have been confirmed, and maybe many of them are spurious. However, I
suspect that the tests miss some real problems.

The idea that the US government needs to collect student loans from
those who are unable to work is absurd. The only "economy" that
depends on collecting this money is that of the evil rich. Even
asking students to pay for college is right-wing. If they have to
pay, it should be based on their incomes, as in
the Oregon
plan.

What's more, a large part of these debts were for payments to
for-profit colleges that tend to be
a waste
of money in the first place. By allowing loans for those colleges,
the government entices people into debts they can't pay.

The "defensive patent license" ought to be called
the "still
offensive patent license", because of the exclusion of anything it
calls a "clone" — which is itself dishonest, since it the way
they define it, it includes a lot more than clones. It
includes any similar functionality.

Apple could license its patents this way and still use them against
free software smart phones.

Abbott says he will bring about a small, insufficient reduction in
emissions by 2020, by methods that
aren't
likely to work at all. Planting trees may be good in other ways,
but it takes a long time for them to pull CO2 out of the
air, assuming they don't die or even burn.

David LaMacchia set up an internet bulletin board site where anyone
could upload and download files. He didn't put the files in it
himself, but the US government wanted to hold him personally
responsible for the files that were uploaded. US government
representatives systematically smeared LaMacchia, who on his lawyer's
advice did not dare say they were wrong; but he had already explained
the facts to people at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and that's
where I heard them. This article repeats the givernment's claim.

The government used this smear to push for the passage of the law that
criminalized noncommercial sharing on the Internet, an attack on our
rights that we will have to fight to undo.

You don't have to be Islamist, or even Muslim, to think that people in
a country conquered by the US have the right to resist occupation.
Anyone who hates oppression believes that. Why shouldn't Muslims say
that?

On the other hand, anyone who is such a "good" Muslim as to support
Islam's contempt for women, its cruel Shari'a law, or
its disrespect for
everyone's religious freedom, deserves plenty of criticism. You
can't duck the odium of those views by saying it's a religion.

There is another campaign asking people to fax Obama copies of the New
York Times editorial that says Snowden should be offered a reduced
punishment. I think that is an insult to a hero, and I didn't support
it. I support this instead.

The defeat of al Qa'ida would mean the defeat of the worst sort of
fanaticism. However, if the other Islamist militias are part of the
winning side, I fear that women, human rights and non-Muslims in those
areas will still be on the losing side.

The argument that a state has the right to fight its enemies when they
are sheltered by another state is valid in some circumstances, but one
must look at the rest of the situation. For instance, did the
Ecuadorian government shelter or sponsor that camp (or even know about
it)? Did Colombia ask Ecuador for assistance in dislodging it?

There may be other relevant factors. The Colombian state was and
still is closely connected with the worst terrorist group in Colombia,
the paramilitaries.

Although the FARC have degenerated into drug trafficking and kidnap
for profit, they are still better than the paramilitaries. Is support
for the FARC justified on these grounds?

Taxes like this are necessary to conserve fuel, and the pain they
impose is nothing compared to the pain they will avoid. I think the
protesters are making a mistake — like protesting about a visit
to the dentist.

I am not especially bothered by the NSA's having these, since they
won't be installed everywhere (and in the US would require a court
order). What's dangerous to democracy is
general
surveillance applied to everyone.

The software freedom fight comes to the farm, as
computerized
farm machines have created a battle over whether farms will
control their own computing and data, or be prey to Monsanto and other
large companies.

It's regrettable that this idealistic author adopts the
anti-idealistic term "open source", which was designed to suppress
this sort of idealism. Clearly, the suppression does not work 100%,
but it continues to weaken our movement.

Considering the many ways not having an abortion can harm a
woman — before, during, and years after birth — it would
make more sense to require a waiting period for the decision
not to have an abortion.

I joined the ACLU when George I criticized Governor Dukakis for being
a "card-carrying member", effectively likening the defense of civil
liberties to Communism. I asked myself, "If Michael Dukakis can be an
ACLU member, why am I not one?" Then I joined.

Why are pipelines less safe than previously? Maybe they are just
getting old. Maybe the government doesn't require as much inspection
and maintenance as before. Maybe the government has fewer inspectors,
or doesn't dare fine companies enough to make them
comply. It certainly isn't trying hard
enough.

I'm glad that there is work available for homeless people, but
cheating them is despicable. (It's common practice for businesses to
cheat workers.) And this work might be dangerous to them, and to
others if not done right. It needs to be done by people who know what
they are doing.

This is in addition to many other jobs that will be eliminated —
drivers, for instance, and supermarket sales jobs.

We are already seeing the effects of this, in long-term unemployment
of people who have given up looking for jobs. All economic growth
goes to the rich few, so it creates few jobs. The jobs lost to
computerization will not be replaced by other jobs.

If you are a young person now and you are not brilliant or aiming at a
career such as medicine, I recommend that you not get yourself in debt
to go to college. You'll never pay that debt off. Instead, organize
for your state to adopt
Oregon's
plan for funding a college education. If it takes ten years to
win, you can go to college then, and you'll still be better off.

Passing the entrance exam for a Japanese university is less
challenging for an AI than you might suppose. Those exams focus on
rote learning, so passing requires a lot of knowledge but no
creativity. It does, however, require human-style common sense for
the reading comprehension, and that is the central challenge in AI.

We had a name, in the 1980s, for politicians with views like Obama's:
"Republicans". I used to be a Democrat … until the Democratic
party as a whole turned conservative and no longer deserved my
support. However, we are now electing some Democrats worthy of the
name, such as Elizabeth Warren.

The owners of the factory in which fire killed 112 workers now face
murder
charges.

I don't think that the executives of western clothing lines deserve to
be charged with murder. It is more effective to make them responsible
for the working conditions of the factories that make their clothing
— and prosecute every time they fail to check, not just
on the rare occasions when that kills someone.

Netanyahu does not care how this affects the "negotiations", since he
has no intention of making a peace agreement. I think his goal is to
show that he still has the US government cowed; that he can ridicule
the US and the "negotiations" and Kerry won't dare make a peep.

Thug infiltrators tried to get Occupy Austin protesters to commit
violence, but the protesters firmly refused. So the
infiltrators
gave them "lockboxes" — basically tools to strap themselves
together for a sit-in so that removing them would be more work —
then accused them of a felony, "possessing a criminal instrument",
even though legally lockboxes don't qualify.

Next time you think about how Putin threatens nonviolent protesters
with years in prison, remember that the US does it too.

President Reagan's "welfare queen" was a real woman whose life was
crime after crime against most everyone she came in contact with. Her
frauds against the welfare system were
illegal
already.

She was sentenced to prison for some of these frauds, and it looks
like she deserved it. However, Reagan and Clinton used her as the
excuse to punish all poor families in America, and they did not
deserve this punishment.

It is important to reduce the rate of births by teenagers,
but instead of doing this the cruel Conservative way, which
consists of pushing poor people's children into worse poverty,
let's do it the kind Progressive way: offer taxpayer-funded
reliable birth control to every teenager.

Officer Vagnini, who committed illegal anal searches against a series
of people, was
sentenced
to only two years in prison. That's not much of a sentence for a
serial rapist. Meanwhile, the other thugs that supported his crime
wave received very light sentences.

It is also irrelevant as a reason. If the state were allowed to
monitor everything and search everything, it could prevent many kinds
of crimes, as well as many kinds of dissent and whistleblowing, but
that doesn't invalidate the 4th amendment.

These schemes always make mistakes, and this is proof that that
continues to happen. But let's not be distracted by the mistakes.
Even if they could fix all the mistakes, which they can't, that would
not make censorship acceptable. Fixing 90% of the mistakes, which
maybe they could do, would not make it acceptable either. Down with
censorship and the tyrannical rulers that impose it!

When a government accuses someone of publishing "false news", or says
it is illegal to interview someone because he's been declared a
terrorist (or even convicted in a fair trial of a terrorist act),
that's manifest tyranny.

The US-backed government of Yemen did something similar to
Abdulelah
Haidar Shaye, imprisoning him at Obama's request for interviewing
people in al Qa'ida.

SD cards (and other memories) have processors whose programs
can be
changed.

If it is normal to change that software — for instance, if
users are sometimes given upgrades — then it is an injustice
that these programs are proprietary. However, even if it is not
normal to change that software, this is a dangerous vulnerability
to viruses, the NSA, etc.

The financial "savings" achieved this way will lead to bigger
financial costs, as well as injuries and deaths. That's part of the
goal: to accustom more people to poverty. Once this is the norm for
immigrants, it will be applied to Britons.

It makes sense to appeal to these illegitimate powers to see when
their interests are threatened by something that threatens us too.
But we must take care, when doing this, not to grant any legitimacy to
their rule. We need to replace plutocracy with
democracy.

Declaring groups "terrorist" without a trial is a gross violation of
human rights. The US must cease this practice to set an example of
respect for human rights; if it does not, other countries such as
Egypt will surely take inspiration from the US' bad example.

A US court
ruled
that prisoners in Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus.

It is legitimate to capture enemy soldiers and hold them as prisoners
of war. (If this were not allowed, prisoners would instead be shot.)
Being a prisoner of war is not punishment for a crime, and no trial is
needed. Of course, prisoners of war do have rights, and torture
violates them.

However, the 2010 decision, about people kidnaped in other countries
where the US was not at war, and then transported to Afghanistan just
to hold them in prison, was wrong. Those cases are exactly like
Guantanamo.

Unfortunately, the iFixit manuals are not free. The article says they
are, but it means they are gratis. I tried to convince Kyle Wiens to
release them under a free license, but failed. I hope he will change
his mind.

Hakan Yaman was
tortured
by Turkish thugs who mistook him for a protester. (Not that it
would have been justified to torture a real protester.) They gouged
out an eye and threw him in a fire: attempted premeditated murder.

The government is has been unable to find the thugs who were
responsible. Perhaps it has not tried very hard.

This case is among the most extreme, among the general repression of
the protesters.

Whether this is a bad thing depends on how humanity reacts to it. The
high price of oil reduces demand: Americans drive less, nowadays, than
they did when oil was cheaper. The high price of oil encourages
investment in other energy sources — some renewable (solar,
wind, geothermal) and some polluting (coal, fracking, nuclear).

If only our governments pushed for renewable energy rather than
polluting energy.

We could use a lot less energy for heating and for transport if we
pushed harder to achieve that. Amory Lovins showed years ago that a
small fraction of what we now use could do the job. And mass transit
uses a lot less energy than travel by car.

The extent of economic inequality in the US is so great that our main
need is not increased production of things, but rather a way for
everyone to get a share. If the US produced only half as much, we
would get along ok if the poor got a bigger share.

He did not say it in so many words, but that's the inescapable
implication. For Israel to demand release of an American who spied
for Israel — or any other unrelated concession — says,
"Peace isn't something we seek, just something we might do for the US
in exchange for something we want."

I don't see telemarketing as particularly bad, just wasteful and
annoying. I have never bought anything from a telemarketer, and I
don't let the call go on for more than a few seconds, because I don't
want to spend my time on them.

It is useful to train yourself out of applying normal ideas of
politeness — for instance, that it is rude to hang up on someone
— to a commercially-motivated call from a stranger.

I think it might be good to legally require telemarketing calls to
start by playing a recording that says, "Stay on the line if you wish
to talk with a telemarketer."

A study in which researchers interviewed people at home found that the
rate of domestic violence in England is
substantially
more than was known. Many are afraid to tell anyone what is
happening to them.

This is no surprise, however. The law was designed to offer medical
coverage to many of the uninsured poor, while catering to medical
insurance companies. To reduce costs for others would have required
the
public
option and big savings would have required a single payer plan.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni theocratist group. Hezbollah is a
Shi'ite group, militant but more concerned with defending Shi'ites'
political interests than with religion. The idea that they would work
together is as ridiculous as the idea that Saddam Hussein and al
Qa'ida would work together — but Dubya found it useful to claim
they did.

As for the charges of escaping from prison, at that time state agents
went around arresting (and sometimes killing) people for political
reasons. Zero-tolerance for escapes, and immunity for the captors, is
hardly justice.

Once he finally got himself arrested, for spray-painting on city hall,
the prosecutors demanded outrageous and unusual punishments, even
violating standard penal policies, apparently out of pure spite.

There are two ways to consider terrorist attacks such as those in New
York in 2001 and in London in 2005: as crimes or as war.

To consider them as crimes means responding by hunting and prosecuting
the perpetrators — not by launching wars. If we view the issue
in terms of crime, the attack on Rigby was a crime too and prosecuting
its perpetrators was legitimate. However, invading Iraq was not
legitimate and we have a duty to prosecute those responsible.

On the other hand, if we consider those terrorist attacks as war and
say they justify war in response, the enemy can say the same. Viewed
as war, the killing of Rigby was an attack by a guerrilla force on a
military target. The US has committed plenty of war crimes, and so
have the Taliban and its supporters, but attacking Rigby wasn't one.

If you are a young person today, there is considerable danger you will
be killed by global heating — not soon, of course, but when it
reaches the point where millions are starving, and fighting over food,
globalized supply chains could break down, which would make a lot of
technology and industry stop working world-wide.

We can't predict what will happen, as there are too many
imponderables. Maybe some lucky surprise will avert the disaster, but
do you want to bet your life on that? If we are to avoid it, we have
to curb the greenhouse gas emission now.

Can anyone find out what has happened with the most un-American part
of the NDAA, the provision that allows the military to imprison anyone
without trial if the person is accused of being a "terrorist"?

Christian extremists say that secularists are fighting a "war on
Christmas", but the real War on Christmas is the one
waged
by business.

Speaking as a secularist, I am not fighting a war on Christmas. I
have no conflict with what Christians do for Christmas, as long as
they don't try to get the government to promote their religion above
my nonreligion.

This particular problem is ultimately the state's fault, since the
right approach to growing marijuana is to legalize it. However, that
would not eliminate the issue of trafficking; that needs to be
addressed by itself.

The first step toward obsessive fear was when parents started thinking
that children could never be left alone. I remember how happy I was,
when I was 8 or so, during those periods when I was home and I could
read without being annoyed by my mother.

Meanwhile, no one freaked out about the fact that I, and the other
students in my school, walked to school and back on the sidewalks of
Manhattan.

Being tased is surely less dangerous than being hit with a bullet. If
we think of tasing as a substitute for shooting, tasing probably
results in less harm. But if tasers encourage people to shoot, on the
basis that they are safe, tasers could result in more harm.

If someone were accused of the murder, that person would deserve a
fair trial, being considered innocent until proven guilty. However,
for these political purposes, we can presume the Russian state is
guilty.

Republicans' method for reducing the unemployment rate is to cut
unemployment benefits. In North Carolina, this made 77,000 people
give up looking for work, so they are not longer counted in the
"unemployment
rate".

It is a mistake to judge the success or failure of government policies
by the official unemployment rate. The real measure of unemployment
is number of people who are of working age but not working or in
school, and not independently wealthy.

TAFTA, the proposed business deregulation treaty for the US and
Europe, threatens to give many businesses
increased
power. For instance, it could blow away the just-established
Volcker
Rule, ban
labeling
of GMOs, make medicines more expensive, and stop countries from
protecting data from spying by other countries.

Once you accept in principle the idea of forbidding some sort of
insult, there is no natural stopping point; any statement that might
hurt someone's feelings is likely to be banned.

I do not feel offended when people call me "fat", if they do not mean
it as an insult, since it is undeniably true. If someone does mean it
as an insult, that indicates a mental confusion on that person's part.
Being fat is not an ethical failing.

It is amazing that Ms Lawrence is so sensitive to insults to her
appearance — as if Einstein felt crushed if anyone said he was
stupid. This bespeaks an inner insecurity that disregards objective
reality. That insecurity is her real problem, not the insults.

It's perfectly logical: someone who wants to sell as much fossil fuel
as possible, and cares nothing about the rest of the world, would try
to discourage, even prohibit installation of solar generators.

Australia plans to
imprison
refugees on accusation, without trial, by requiring them to sign a
"code of conduct" in which they promise not to commit crimes.

This means that if they are accused of crimes, rather than trying them
like anyone else, functionaries can decide they have "violated the
code of conduct," cancel their visas, and imprison them right away.

Schools in Puyallup, WA, are installing
palm
scanners for students to identify themselves with.

I think palm scanners are much less bad than fingerprint scanners,
because people don't leave palmprints on everything they touch.
Perhaps the palm scanners are ok, if the state can't get any personal
data from them.

This attack does seem to be premeditated murder, but I think it is
stretching the term "terrorism" to apply it here. Stretching strong
words such as "terrorism" is a form of inflation that devalues them.

The first charge is blatant distortion of the facts, but the second
shows blatant disrespect for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to insult anyone, especially including officials.
A state that denies this right is clearly in the wrong.

The bactericides can cause harm, and there is a possibility that the
killing of bacteria may lead indirectly to the spread of asthma
because people's immune systems don't get trained as they should be.

The servant is also Indian. Indians should cheer that the US is doing
something to protect poor Indians from exploitation by the Indian
elite. Reportedly it is a long time since an Indian diplomat was
arrested. It has probably been an even longer time since Indian
servants' wages were protected in this way.

The strip search seems excessive, however, for the nature of the
accusation.

The ship carries around 3000 sailors. For 50 of those healthy adults,
mostly in their 20s, to get cancer in under 3 years is amazing.

The ship is named after President Reagan, and his name should not be
mentioned without reminding people how he harmed the US. He gave arms
to terrorists in Lebanon to ransom hostages, to get funds to illegally
fund terrorists in Nicaragua. He also launched the campaign to
impoverish most Americans, which continues to this day. His
supporters called him the Great Communicator, but Great Swindler would
fit better.

However, I am disappointed with the fuss that people make about his
death. Why fetishize a corpse that used to be the body of a great
person? A dead body is not a person anymore. It's not Mandela's
corpse that deserves our admiration, but rather his life.

I don't think Saudi Arabia is likely to use its influence to hold back
Islamist extremists, since it has spent years funding and supplying
them. There have been reports about this all along, and the US
government must have know about this. The US ignored the Saudi
connection as al-Qa'ida, boosted by Saudi money, took over the Syrian
resistance to Iran's friend. What kind of strategy was that?

I doubt whether a 20-year prison sentence is the best way to teach a
16-year-old not to drive while drugged and drunk. However, I agree
with the article that, whatever society's best response is, the
culprits should not be allowed to pay their way to more favorable
treatment.

I don't advocate a Communism that would abolish private property and
business. However, the decision to have private business still leaves
a wide range of possible societies. Cruel societies such as today's
US and Mexico are one option, but today's Scandinavia is also an
option. Some socialist elements can make society much better for the
non-rich while most work continues to be done by private businesses.

The split mainly derives from the partition of Poland in the late
1700s, when the Russian empire took the eastern part and the Austrian
empire took the western part. However, the eastern part was under
Mongol rule for centuries before Poland took it.

This also increases the demand for certain minerals to the point that
armies fight over mines in Africa.

Banning the shipment of e-waste to poor countries is proving
ineffective. Requiring a 3-year warranty for every computer sold
might do a better job. Many of the purchasers would demand warranty
service, so the manufacturers would have to make their products
cheaper to repair. In addition, a lot of the waste would end up in
the hands of authorized service agents. Regulating its disposal by
them would be easier.

This is a consequence of using drones as death squads, in places that
are not battlefields. A wedding party would not travel through a
battlefield; people would recognize the danger and stay under cover.

This seems to be pure PR. They know that Snowden is no longer
revealing any US secrets. He no longer has any! Before going to
Russia, he divested himself of all copies so the data would not fall
into Russian hands. Journalists have the data now.

Thus, what the NSA officials really proposes is to make Snowden a
hostage to make the journalists stop publishing.

No matter what these companies might put in their contracts,
centralizing data from schools in one company inherently makes them
more vulnerable. In addition, these technologies increase the amount
of data collection about a student.

The student's data should be kept on a physical memory that is the
student's property, on loan to the school. Teachers should be allowed
to look at the data when there is a valid reason, and the physical
memory should be wiped after the term, leaving nothing but the grades.

If we banned large magazines and guns that repeat at a high rate, much
of the problem will go away.

I fear that these lockdowns will teach many children to think in the
direction of shooting a lot of people, in school or elsewhere. When
that's what you know (or think you know), you will think of that.

I think there is some truth in this article. At the same time, the
approach it recommends won't put millions of long-term-employed back
to work. If society does not need these people to work, it must offer
them good lives anyway.

It is incoherent to say "If you don't work, you don't eat" and "There
is no work for you" at the same time.

I agree with their manifesto, because it doesn't insist narrowly that
the solution consists of limiting state access to massive dossiers
while continuing to accumulate them.

It took me a while to find a place to refer to it, because the
reference I saw was to a page I could not even view, on change.org.
When I tried to view that page, all I got was a brief message saying
the site requires Javascript and cookies even to see a page.

In addition, they ask people to endorse the statement on change.org.
I won't do that, or refer others to that, because of the requirement
for nonfree Javascript software.

To hold the criminal responsible for the consequences of the crime
is valid when the crime is comparably grave. For instance, Dubya and
B'liar should be held responsible for all the killings in Iraq caused
by their invasion, including the killings carried out by the Sunni and
Shi'ite militias as well as by the Bush forces.

However, putting a hand in a pocket is hardly grave enough to justify
blaming anyone for other people's shootings. In addition, it gives
the shooters immunity, which encourages them to shoot again.

The idea that there is a principle that requires harsh, strict and
pointless application of rules is a collective folly known as "zero
tolerance". "Zero tolerance" is the basis for
the school-to-prison
pipeline. We must condemn the general idea, every time it comes
up, and not only its crazy excesses.

Blackman suspected this was because he went to a meeting in London
about massive surveillance. The thugs said it is for some kind of
censorship. We should not assume they told the truth, but if they
did, that is no better. Censorship is evil too.

Today's law in Australia (and the US) would have made it a crime to
send funds to "terrorists" such as Nelson Mandela, and maybe even to
teach anti-apartheid activists how to use a photocopier. But that's
not enough for right-wing politicians, who want
to imprison
protesters that interfere with business.

I guess those right-wing politicians support Putin's plans to imprison
Greenpeace protesters.

It is a fundamental injustice to allow functionaries to label a group
as "terrorist" without putting the group on trial and convicting it of
that crime.

I think this demonstrates the fallacy trying to address the problem of
surveillance by saying users "own" the personal data that companies
want. Companies have so much clout that they can get people to "sell"
nearly anything — especially with mass unemployment and falling
wages making people desperate.

It's wrong for the NSA to track people in general, and wrong for
Google to do it. We need to change browsers so they do not cooperate
with this. GNU IceCat blocks most third-party material in web pages.

As for the cooperation that the NSA gets from portable phone apps, you
should accept nothing less from proprietary software.

That shows thugs' attitude towards our rights. If these threats by
thugs are not illegal, we need to make them illegal.

Furthermore, the thugs should be required to carry audio recorders at
all times when on duty. If when accused they don't present recordings
to show the accusation is false, courts should take the citizen's word
over the thug's word.

I know someone in California who was so traumatized by watching
coverage of the Sep 2001 attacks as to become afraid to go outside.

That morning I made an intentional decision not to watch the coverage.
It would have been both boring and anxiety-producing; all in all, I
preferred to work on an article talking about the danger of
sacrificing our freedom for "security".

To tighten rules for allowing foreign workers, and expel some, is not
in itself wrong. To kill them, or even to physically abuse them, is
not excused by the decision to expel them. Denying them the chance to
sell their property is also wrong.

Oil and natural gas from the north pole have no value because they
will never be used. To extract even 30% of the known reserves will
lead to global heating disaster. Before civilization gets to the
point of extracting the expensive fossil fuels from the north pole, it
will collapse.

When I talk about surveillance in my speeches, I call for "three
cheers for Edward Snowden." You might think this is superfluous
because everyone knows that he deserves our admiration. Not so! US
politicians (especially those that support massive surveillance)
continue trying to demonize Snowden. We have to defeat them, and the
way to do it is by showing our views.

Cutting social security is a right-wing idea that most Americans
reject. Please don't grant it a sort of legitimacy by calling it the
"center". It is only "central" between the two right-wing major
parties.

The radioactive material leaking from the Fukushima
meltdowns will
kill people, including an estimated 800 eventual deaths (not soon)
from eating contaminated fish.

This is 800 out of the millions who are likely to eat some of that
fish.

800 deaths is a large number to result from a single accident. It is
important to try to stop more radiative material from leaking into the
ocean from Fukushima, since that as it continues leaking, it could
kill more hundreds.

On the other hand, the danger to any individual from these leaks is
minuscule; there is no point taking any trouble to make sure you never
eat even a little of that fish.

I don't want to watch violent porn, or violent non-porn, but neither
should be censored.

However, if a business sells videos of real rapes or other real crimes
and pays or rewards those who commit the crimes, the business
participates in those crimes. That is valid grounds for prosecution.

I am surprised that the credit card payments can't be used to trace
the business that runs the site.

Mandela was right: nonviolence is not the only ethical way to resist
oppression. Those oppressed with violence are entitled to fight back
with violence. Of course, the founding fathers of the United States
said the same thing about resistance to British oppression.

This site alleges that John F
Kennedy Jr. was killed by a bomb in his plane, which was followed by a
US government coverup effort, and alleges this was done by Israeli
secret agents because he was about to publish secrets of their
involvement in the assassination of Israeli Premier Rabin.

This extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, and this
article isn't enough. So I am not convinced this claim is true. But
I think it is not immediately dismissable. To verify the truth of the
facts cited would be a lot of work. I don't have time to do that.

Thus I have decided to point readers at his report without saying I
believe any of it.

Any geoengineering method that aims to affect temperature directly
will not do anything to stop ocean acidification due to dissolved CO2.
This threatens to destroy all coral reefs, along with all the other
species that depend on coral reefs. The result could easily be the
loss of most of the sea food that a billion humans depend on.

In experiments, CO2 affected the behavior of some species of fish too
-- they ceased to hide from predators. That could wipe them out.

As weapons of war, drones are not very different from bombers with
human crews. Drones raise a special issue when they are used away
from battlefields, in countries where the US says it is not fighting
— Pakistan, for instance. In these cases, they more resemble
death squads or terror campaigns than a war.

Bashir said that if anyone deserved the punishments that slaves
received, it would be Ms Palin. The use of "deserved" indicates a
counterfactual: Bashir explicitly avoided saying that she, or anyone,
deserves those punishments. He was criticized wrongly for a palinode
that was entirely justified.

Rahinah Ibrahim's daughter, who is a US citizen, was supposed to go to
the US and testify as a witness in Ms Ibrahim's lawsuit. The US
government blocked her return by putting her on the no-fly list, then
lied
about it in court.

This article says that the list Rahinah is suing to be removed from
is the no-fly list.

The government's lawyers are claiming that the government can exclude
"secret" information from the case even if it has been published.
We've seen this contempt for reality in the
Obama
regime's attitude towards secrets revealed by Wikileaks and
Snowden.

Over and over we see that US government agents are willing to lie to
achieve their missions. Some lie to Congress, while others lie in
court. These lawyers should be disbarred, just as Clapper should be
jailed for contempt of Congress.

The privatized prison can't make a profit without squeezing someone,
so it has a reason to isolate those who complain about the squeezing.
But non-privatized
prisons use
solitary confinement eagerly too.

The NSA uses this to determine when people meet each other physically.
Thus, if you are going to a meeting, take the batteries out of your
phone well before you get to it, as a courtesy to those you will meet
with.

We did not know that the NSA was tracking phones world-wide, but we
have known all along that they were being tracked by phone companies,
and the governments that control them, and often by Apple and Google
too. That's already unacceptable.

I have never "connected to our modern communication system" because I
refused to be tracked. I have refused for 15 years now. This does
not require me to "live in a cave". In my travels, if I need to make
a call in a train or on the street, I ask whoever is there to call for
me.

These ads are typically shown by software and services that are
malicious in other ways — for example, a game server that
monitors you might also show ads based on figuring out when you are
vulnerable, or a car might monitor your emotional state using
proprietary software you can't change.

I don't think that animals in general have a right to life — not
even whales. I don't think, for instance, that we have a duty to stop
orcas (one type of whale) from killing other whales as we would
protect humans from being killed. I don't think we have a duty to
stop chimps from killing other chimps.

But it is important to prevent the loss of species and ecosystems,
because that is an irrecoverable loss.

I wish I knew who made the video, who distributed it, and whether the
students in it approved of doing so. Depending on those facts,
someone might have done something wrong here, but probably not the
news site.

The case concerns Australian spying during negotiations with East
Timor for a treaty over fossil fuels. The witness was going to prove
that Australia bugged the Timorese negotiating team. Apparently the
current Australian government is so subservient to fossil fuel
interests that it will trash traditional civil liberties for them.

The court should regard the witness's claims as proven conclusively by
his arrest. That will serve the cause of justice in this case.
Repairing the damage to civil liberties in Australia will take rather
more.

Intense
business lobbying — for false solutions or just against real
ones — helped make the Warsaw climate negotiations a failure.

It's too bad the report uses the nebulous term
"intellectual
property". I suppose the companies reported on used that term,
because the confusion it spreads serves their purposes; those who
oppose them would do well to pull that veil aside.

Pieces 5mm in size shouldn't be called "microplastics". Perhaps some
pieces are small enough to deserve that name.

Once the worms have a low level of toxins, the animals that eat the
worms will accumulate higher levels, and the animals that eat those
will get even higher levels. The same thing happens with mercury,
which is why tuna have so much mercury that they are dangerous for
humans to eat.